TCS Wikipedia Project

Shuchi Chawla is leading an effort to improve the quality of TCS entries on Wikipedia. She has put together an advice document for researchers who want to help (also available from Theory Matters under the “Resources” tab), and at the bottom of this post is a spreadsheet where you can contribute suggestions for entries that to be created or improved. From Shuchi:

Wikipedia is a great resource for people outside of the TCS community to learn about TCS topics, and provides an educational and outreach opportunity for our community. Our community should ensure that important TCS topics get adequate and accurate coverage in Wikipedia through articles written by experts. Unfortunately, writing or editing articles for Wikipedia, and ensuring that the edits are not overwritten, can be a daunting task. It is a task best addressed as a community effort rather than by a few individuals. This post is our attempt to mobilize the community towards this effort and to offer advice on how you can support this effort.

There are many ways to contribute:
– Edit articles that do not have enough substance
– Create new articles for missing topics
– Organize a group effort at your institution, e.g., as an assignment in a graduate course, or an “edit-a-thon” at a workshop or conference
– Suggest articles that need editing
– Last but not the least: please email us if you have advice or stories to contribute to this article.

We are grateful to David Eppstein for providing much of the information and advice for this blog post. Thanks also go to Scott Aaronson for sharing with us his and others’ experiences in editing TCS Wikipedia articles.

Suggesting articles that need work:
Below is a list of articles that currently have little or no coverage on Wikipedia and are most in need of contributions. To contribute to this list, follow this link and edit the spreadsheet appropriately. If you are working on an article, we would appreciate it if you can make a note of it on the spreadsheet.